When it comes to fairytale themes, I’m always game! The Grimm Forest is filled with your favorite storybook characters. But these aren’t Hans Christian Anderson’s stories, these are the Grimm stories. These characters each have a bit of a mischievous side to them, ready to help players reign victorious over their opponents, even if it means using devious tricks and cunning.
How Do You Play The Grimm Forest?
The goal of The Grimm Forest is to be the first to build three houses on your player mat.
To build those houses, you need to gather resources. At the start of every turn, all players will choose in secret which location they want to visit. (Straw, wood, brick.) This is also the time for players to decide if they are going to play a Fable card. Fable cards are one time use cards that allow players to do special things that can impact other players’ plans. These cards must be chosen at the same time as location cards and are visible to the group so everyone knows who is playing a Fable card.
Once location and Fable cards are selected, everyone will reveal at the same time. If you were the only player to visit a location, you get to take all of the resources. If multiple people visited the same location, you divide everything equally, leaving what can’t be divided for next time.
Then it turns to the build phase.
In turn order, players will take two actions. This gives them the opportunity to build a house section, take any one resource, use a special action on a friend card, or draw a Fable card from the deck to their hand.
Once all players have taken their actions, the resource locations are replenished and players prepare for a new round.
The game is over once one (or more) players have built three houses at the end of the building phase.
What Do We Think?
The Grimm Forest is an excellent family game! From the theme to the components, this is one that I can see parents and children enjoying playing together. It’s the perfect balance of easy enough to include younger players, while being fun and interesting enough to entertain the adults as well.
The game itself is quite straighforward — surprisingly actually considering the suggested age on the box of 14+.
From a family perspective, I love how straightforward the game play is. Each turn you choose where you want to go gather resources, decide if you want to play an optional fable card, then reveal! This part is easy enough for kids to handle on their own. It’s also a great introduction to critical thinking and deduction. If you can see that someone is in need of some more brick to build to top of their brick house, you know that odds are high they’ll be heading to the brick location. Then it’s up to you to think whether or not you’d like to stop them gathering all the resources by choosing to go there as well. Similarly, you can use what might be an obvious choice, perhaps everyone thinks you’re going to go to the forest to gather wood to finish your house, but instead you choose to go gather straw since you think you’ll be able to take all the resources there for yourself rather than dividing it all up.
Yet all that isn’t to say that the game is simple. There is depth in the game. So much is about correctly deducing the motives of your opponents, predicting their moves, and besting them with your own. A great game of The Grimm Forest will find players skillfully leveraging both their movements, Fables, and Friend cards to aid their goals, hinder their opponents, and dodge attacks. And goodness can it be fun when everyone is in it to win it and giving it all they’ve got. My favorite player count with this game is four for that reason. It’s just so much fun with more players.
Amazing Components
The components blew me away! It feels like a deluxe edition! The houses, miniatures, game tray storage, card art — it’s all fantastic. Some of the best components I’ve ever seen. They are so good in fact that I’m disappointed they’re not utilized more. They’re basically just fancy player pawns. The fable characters that come out any time a Fable card is played don’t even need to be moved onto the board, the card itself does the work. This is probably my one complaint with the entire game. It has these amazing miniatures, but it just doesn’t have a need for them. If you’re a painter though, you’ll have a field day.
In one respect though, the components and suggested age on the box does the game a disservice. Not only does it up the cost of the game, but we thought we were going to play a heavier, more strategic, mid-weight game. While there’s definitely a level of strategy involved in the game, it’s certainly not enough to justify the 14+ box age. Kids ages 8 and up can easily play this one. The Grimm Forest feels like a family game and probably isn’t one that we’ll pick to play with our adult only groups, but we’re more than happy to play it anytime the kids ask.
Take That!
Players can use both Friend cards and Fable cards to impact the games of others with varying degrees of meanness, depending on your tolerance level for that sort of thing. If you are not a fan of that style of game play you might just want to be aware going into it.
While we typically stray away from take that mechanics in our family games, (more on that here) we think the Grimm Forest pulls this mechanic off nicely. Everything feels perfectly thematic and adds a playfulness to the game. The designers did great work making sure characters operate how you’d expect them to. I also think that kids who are old enough to play The Grimm Forest are most likely at a good age to handle a moderate level of this style of play. If however you’d prefer to play without this, there’s a helpful guide that shows which cards to take out to avoid a “take that” game.
Summary
The Grimm Forest is a fun game delivered in an amazing package. For a game all about fairytales, it has a surprising amount of deviousness inside. (Though perhaps not surprising for anyone familiar with the Grimm fairytales.) We think this is an excellent family game for parents with kids who are ready to graduate out of kid games and into more strategic fare.
To pick up a copy of The Grimm Forest click here!
Find this and all our favorite games on our Amazon Storefront.
A special thank you to our fiends at Skybound Games for sending us a copy of The Grimm Forest for review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own.
Game Info:
Title: The Grimm Forest
2-4 players Ages 14+
Designer: Tim Eisner
Artist: Lina Cossette, David Forest
Publisher: Druid City Games
